22 - Employment, inflation and growth

Summary

Introduction

Since the end of the Second World War economic policy and controversy in Britain have been directed to ways of attaining a number of related objectives, prominent among which are the maintenance of a high and stable level of employment, reasonable stability of the average level of final product prices, a fairly rapid rate of economic growth, a satisfactory balance of foreign trade and reasonable stability of foreign exchange rates. It can hardly be claimed that there has been complete success in the attainment of these objectives. It is true that employment has been maintained at an extremely high level. The average level of unemployment since 1948 has been little more than 1.5 per cent of the work force. This is probably a lower level of unemployment than that attained in any single year in peace time during the previous century, except perhaps in 1872. Even in the boom years of the prewar trade cycle the percentage of trade unionists unemployed rarely fell below 2 per cent and over the fifty three years from 1861 to 1913 it averaged 4.5 per cent. The actions taken to improve the stability of the system have also had some measure of success. Before the First World War there was a fairly regular trade cycle with an average period of about eight years, during which trade union unemployment fluctuated between about 2 and 10 per cent.